I'm surprised by the absence of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier from your picks. My spouse and I, as well as our children in their 20s, all read the book and were mesmerized by it. Beah does not sugarcoat the horror he lived through, yet his prose is beautiful and his story was life-affirming. While it was clear that he would ultimately get out of Sierra Leone, the book was nonetheless a page turner that kept you wanting to find out what happens next.

I recognize that making a list like this is often thankless work--no sooner does it get posted than your readers clamor to point out egregious omissions, foolhardy inclusions, etc. So with gratitude for the time and effort Salon has taken, I must second the recommendation for a future list of children's best-of titles, as well as the need for a best-of poetry list. Moreover, I would be delighted if Salon made reviews of poetry books or interviews with poets a more regular feature--I think this venue could be an excellent source for non-stuffy, non-academic poetry advocacy.

The Castle in the Forest By Norman Mailer. Completely creepy and yet I was totally inseperable from that book till I was done. It was a very interesting view of Hitler and the Devil. I was in a time warp reading that novel. It was amazing how Norman Mailer wrote a book with a christian concept of the devil and his control in warping the mind of a young Adolph. Mailer's geneology and locations of the Hitler family were researched and accurate based on historical records. I swear for a week I was convinced that Hitler really was formed by the devil.

Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know was probably the best mystery, and one of the best novels, period, that I read all year.

George Hagen's Tom Bedlam never got the attention it deserved.

Eric Gower's The Breakaway Cook was my favorite cookbook of the year.

Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE helped me understand the Bush administration's policies in the same way that a respected professor helped me understand abnormal human behaviour. "Any behaviour makes sense," he said, "if you can get into the person's frame of reference." Her insights make the book one of the most important of the year, to my mind.

Water for Elephants is marvelous, but not too complicated. Jennifer Weiner's Goodnight Nobody is a good mom-read that's not insulting to the intelligence. Also anything by Marian Keyes falls into the lighter-but-not-stupid category of reading. Don't be deceived by the chick-lit covers, as she talks about shopping and Weltzschmertz (sp.)--not a likely combo.

Chabon always gets it right. If you're looking for a young adult book, his Summerland is gorgeous and glorious. I agree that Tom Bedlam was very good and utterly overlooked. Found it in the new books at my library and both adults in our household enjoyed it.

Other especially fab books I've read this year (though they're not necessarily out this year): Eat, Pray, Love; Ahab's Wife; The Thirteenth Tale; Half of a Yellow Sun; A Thousand Days in Venice; Run; Mr. Vertigo; The Turk and My Mother; The Loss of Leon Meed; and Forever (Pete Hamill).

Leon Meed is original and fascinating, plus beautifully written.

In no particular order as they're all great reads and deserve a nod in Salon's or anybody's Book Awards:

Fiction -

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Non-Fiction -

A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald!

Not new but great reads - Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels, and also his Marvel 1602.

Books I read this year that might fit the bill for your youngest (judging from *my* post-partum brain state : )):

Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, anything by Kate Atkinson, Gail Tsukiyama's Street of a Thousand Blossoms, John Connelly's Book of Lost Things. I just finished Brett Paesel's Mommies Who Drink which made me laugh out loud. And I just thoroughly enjoyed (why am I ashamed to admit this?) Courtney Thorne-Smith's Outside In.

But pls keep in mind I spent my maternity leave reading every single Ed McBain mystery ever written...

I've just completed Joan Scott's The Politics of the Veil, a compelling and extremely well-crafted analysis of the French ban on Muslim women students wearing headscarves in public schools. Excellent. Scott, an expert in French history and specifically French women's history, demonstrates how the ban assumes that being French and being Muslim are incompatible. She documents how the voices of French women students who wore the headscarf were not consulted by anyone studying the issue in the French government and among the French left and right. Even French feminists conspicuously ignored what a minority of Muslim women who wore the headscarf said their motives were; these motives, as Scott describes them, did not assume a clear cut opposition between the French republic and Islam, "tradition" and "modernity," women's emancipation and spiritual beliefs. Scott demonstrates brilliantly that these oppositions, hardened, taken as timeless and essential, do the work of ideology and political hysteria. This hysteria deflects attention from the more complex causes of French socio-economic problems. In short, Muslim school girls and a piece of cloth become scapegoats for globalization, the rise of the right in France, and political Islam, none of which had anything to do with the individual young women, all excellent students with no disciplinary problems, who wanted to wear the headscarf to school.

Choosing only 10 books in any year is nigh near impossible, especially since this past year produced (in my view) a bumper crop. Still, this is not a bad list, as these things go.

One "neglected" book that deserves mention is Edwidge Danticat's "Brother, I'm Dying."

But several people have whined that "Water for Elephants" should have been on the list. It's an interesting idea: but in most reality-based reading worlds, a list of the best books of 2007 would be made up of books actually published in 2007.

Ditto Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know, but not for the new mom.

This year's other good read:

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas - memoir

Forgetfulness by Ward Just - fiction

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver - fiction

The Keep by Jennifer Egan (or her Look at Me) - mystery

The Water's Lovely by Ruth Rendell - mystery

A Strange Piece of Paradise - memoir, outstanding

Cooking with Fernet Branca

Almost Moon by Alice Sebold (very good, not great)) - fiction

Something light for the new mom:

Little Heathens Mildred Kalish -memoir

Not That You Asked by Steve Almond -funny essays

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon -fiction